January 12th, 2012
Share Your Favorite Resources To Win An iPad 3 (Yes, 3)!
Calling all teachers, education administrators, students, and parents!
We need your help! We’re looking to compile the ultimate list of education technology resources and want to reward you for helping us out. This isn’t just a token $5 gift card to a gas station though, we want to give you an iPad 3! Yes, that’s a 3. As soon as the next generation iPad becomes available, we’ll send it to a lucky winner randomly chosen from all entries.
How To Enter
Just visit our contest entry form at Edudemic.com by clicking here.
It will walk you through the different ways you can enter. If you’ve entered but want a better chance at that iPad, you can share more education technology resources with us in the comments of that page on Edudemic. You can enter as many times as you like! Each resource counts as one entry.
The contest ends on March 31, 2012 or as soon as the next generation iPad is announced. Since Apple is super secretive about these kind of things, we’re estimating it’ll happen sometime in March. Therefore, we’ll do the drawing the day after the iPad announcement or 3/31/12, whichever comes first.
January 2nd, 2012
What is Shaking Up Education?
ClassroomWindow is getting more press! Check out this excerpt from a recent Reuters article by Deborah Cohen on December 29, 2011:
Can crowdsourcing shake up education?
Consider ClassroomWindow, another Boston startup designed to offer teachers a dedicated channel to review the products and services they regularly use. The concept is not unlike the popular online site Yelp, where customers rate everything from restaurants to retailers, collectively sharing information about their experiences.
“One of the major failings in the educational marketplace is a lack of data from end users,” said company founder and CEO Kirby Salerno, noting that the $25 billion K-12 market is dominated by major suppliers such as the publishing houses McGraw-Hill and Pearson. “This puts teachers in an incredibly powerful position.”
Classroom Window, which is expected to launch in beta in early January, is free to teachers, who can choose to be anonymous when creating their reviews, eliminating worry over possibly offending administrators who hold the purse strings, Salerno said. Profit is expected to come primarily from selling their opinions, which could give suppliers valuable insight about what’s good and bad about their products. Read more…
December 16th, 2011
A New Professionalism for Educators
The following is from a NEA commission report released a week ago. It was completed by a select group of teachers who formed a panel independent of the NEA. The article summarizes the report which includes some radical ideas and suggestions on how to reform education, like a one-year residencyand a performance assessment prior to being hired as a professional teacher.
From the article, “The NEA’s ‘New Professionalism:’”
In the system laid out by the commission, teachers would enter the classroom as novices and, as their skills and accomplishments accumulated, they’d become professional teachers and eventually master teachers. Teachers’ professional advancement through these steps and salary increases would not be determined by “time in service nor by graduate degrees,” as is done now in most places, but rather, by demonstrating their effectiveness. Evaluations would be locally bargained and based on observations by peers and supervisors; “work products” such as lessons and unit plans; contributions to the profession; participation in study groups or action-research; surveys of colleagues, parents, and students; and, finally, student learning outcomes as “measured by classroom, school, district or state assessments.” There’s much more in the report, and it’s worth reading the entire document.
December 13th, 2011
Kirby Salerno is interviewed in the Boston Business Journal!
ClassroomWindow’s founder, Kirby Salerno, was interviewed by Kyle Alspach, a writer for the Boston Business Journal yesterday. Here is some of their conversation:
Teachers are the users of classroom products in U.S. K-12 schools, but others in the schools actually choose the products, such as textbooks and technology. It’s a dysfunctional market, according to ClassroomWindow — a brand-new web startup in Needham that wants to upend the market with a Yelp-style, crowdsourced approach.
The ClassroomWindow tagline: “Where the best solutions win.”
The crowd that will make it happen is the teachers who know which products and services work well in their schools, and which don’t, said ClassroomWindow founder Kirby Salerno.
It’s feedback that can be crucial to improving educational outcomes; but it rarely reaches the actual buyers (and corporate producers) of the products, Salerno said.
Along with reviews, the site will also include publicly-available research and student test scores to enable the best possible buying decisions in schools, he said.
“There is currently no centralized place where that data is captured and shared to help schools make smarter decisions,” Salerno said.
Click here to read the article in its entirety: “A web startup that could impact every U.S. school (and a $20B market)“
December 7th, 2011
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Bullying Issue: A Teachable Moment
Ah, here we go. It’s the holidays and all the holiday television specials that you enjoyed as a child are coming out of the proverbial TV tube. Grab some Christmas Cookies, some hot cocoa with marshmallows, a blanket to wrap around yourself (and throw over your head when the scary parts – there are always scary parts – appear), and curl up on the couch for the evening. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is on the television tonight; sure to bring wonder, toys, and bullies to the small screen. Hold on. Bullies?! It’s true. The majority of the the television special is fraught with Rudolph and his sidekicks being bullied by not only Rudolph’s father, but also Santa Claus. Teachers take note: this is the perfect time to discuss bullies in the classroom. Read more…
